A Challenging Grow - Newbie Growing With LEDs

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So awesome!!
 
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Put some of them upstairs for flowering.

The one on the left is showing yellowish leaves at the bottom with some brown spots. Calcium deficiency? Nitrogen deficiency? Light burn from the sun? (The middle one I JUST put upstairs).

Oh yeah, incredible proud of my genius idea how to protect them from falling (there is sometimes wind on the roof and the pots can at times get REALLY light)....so I made this ghetto holder with a broom-stick and two bike/rubber bands to hold the pots :)
 
So as you can see we started to move those which are "ready" upstairs, in the assumption that now in mid fall, the sun is not too intense and temps are not as crazy as in Summer.

I think we were wrong! Yesterday it was BRUTAL again on the sunroof and if one thing is for sure, sun is burning down here almost every day including in Winter. It is very obvious the plants don't really like this extreme sun exposure...along with other things like the pots/soil getting really hot from the sun. (Basically, there is direct sun on the roof all day long, I was up there myself yesterday and hardly couldn't handle it myself).

What we're planning now is getting some sun shade thing which I want to put up so that the plants have some shade from noon to about 4:00pm-ish. Some of those shades I saw online are blocking 40% of the sun, and I think it should be perfect.

Don't laugh, I went even so far a while back to create a small computer shade simulation with a Windows tool called "SketchUp". What I did, I recreated the Sunroof to scale and it uses the actual, real coordinates from Google Earth.
With this I can see the actual shade/sun..and I can enter different times and dates and see what parts of the roof are getting the most sun/shade. Yes it's beyond nerdy that I did that but it's actually really helpful :)

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flexy123 said:
Don't laugh, I went even so far a while back to create a small computer shade simulation with a Windows tool called "SketchUp". What I did, I recreated the Sunroof to scale and it uses the actual, real coordinates from Google Earth.
With this I can see the actual shade/sun..and I can enter different times and dates and see what parts of the roof are getting the most sun/shade. Yes it's beyond nerdy that I did that but it's actually really helpful :)
Click to expand...

Made perfect sense to me :idea: Jim
 
That backyard reminds me of homes here in south fl. haha, I'm so spooked to have anything outside sunbathing.
nonetheless things looks good, keep it up.
 
Update after some laziness break:

We have gradually started to put plants on the Sunroof for flowering..as well with some Chillies. It worked out BEAUTIFULLY.

Two of the plants (which we put up earlier) Fruit Spirit, Royal Caramel are already full in flower for about two weeks, the other two on the right are still in the pre-flower phase.
I also started to see some JALAPENOS on my Chillies! This is fricking amazing.

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The picture is probably a week or so old, I was too lazy/busy today taking new pictures. I also "upgraded" the "base" I did there for keeping the plants from tipping from the wind! This is really the biggest problem! So I got more broom sticks, zip-tie and flexible ropes and built a more sturdy base to hold the pots.
 
*** PEST PANIC ***

For some time I already noticed lots of ants in the greenhouse. (This is where we have some vegging and more Chillies until they are ready to go on the Sunroof).

I put some ant-traps up last week and didn't really worry too much.

Today I do some random stuff in the greenhouse and see that literally all the Chillies and the MJ is infested with with mites/lice, on the underside of the leaves!! ALL.OF.THEM.

I quickly learned (on Google) this must be "aphids" and that those bugs are "really, really bad" and I must do something about them as quickly as I can.

I started to freak, so I rushed all the plants from the green house up on the roof and carefully sprayed/hosed them down with the water hose. This was recommended to get rid of most of the eggs, larvae or whatever this is.

I also looked around on the internet since I wanted something in addition, some insecticide to spray and kill the bugs.

I didn't want to wait til I order something off the internet, so I jumped on my bike and rode approx 5 mls (a very scenic route by the way) to the closest grow shop, "Callosa Punto Verde" and bought a natural insecticide "Align" which is similar to "Neem Oil" respective contains the main ingredient of what's in Neem Oil. According to the description it should help kill and stop all those pests including aphids.

So after I came back sweating like a monkey I foliar-sprayed all plants with that stuff, 1ml per 1 liter of water as per instructions. It's a very tiny 15ml bottle but should last a very long time. I hope it can stop that cr@p.

Oh, I also learned that those aphids have some sort of partnership with the ants, the ants eat the sap the aphids secrete plus the ants protect the aphids/bugs from their natural enemies. So I put a SECOND ant-trap up in the greenhouse, I need to fight the ants AND those aphids. But the ants so far seem pretty un-impressed by the ant-traps...
 
Today I made some mixture of "insecticidal soap" from natural soap flakes. Very easy, just a TBSP of those flakes in some warm water. I also see that those soap flakes (which are normally used for laundry) contains as the only additional ingredient a perfume "limonene".

At first I though it's bad because you should not make insecticidal soap that contains perfume, but I learned that limonene, by pure coincidence is actually an insecticide and is biological and should be safe for plants. So basically how it looks, those €0.99 soap flakes could make the PERFECT bug spray and I could've probably saved me getting the special stuff online.

So today again I sprayed all the plant's top/bottom like crazy...waited an hour and then sprayed them off WELL with the water hose again. Not sure whether I really NEED to rinse off the soap....but I did just to be on the safe side, to wash off the soap and what remained from the bugs/eggs etc.

While I was at it (although I did it yesterday already) I sprayed and cleaned the greenhouse also with my insecticidal soap because there is still ants crawling. Really want to get rid of all those bugs. Hope the soap got 'em :)
 
The greatest challenge up on the roof is really fixing the pots so they don't tip over. It's weird because the roof is enclosed by a 1.50m or so wall, but the wind here in Spring/Fall is crazy despite the wall. A stick broke yesterday and the wind almost pulled out a plant from a pot.

In the meantime I also got some "real" insecticidal soap and this, together with the Neem stuff I think seemed have gotten rid of most of the bugs. It's actually really cool thinking about that the grow is "pretty much" all organic, with organic fertilizers and organic/natural things to kill bugs. I mean, everything we grow you either smoke or eat...so I wouldn't really want to use toxic stuff there.
 
Hey bro! Nice to see you are doing good there!
One small hint from me - the best way to get rid of those aphids outdoors is larves of ladybugs. I believe you can get it in almost any garden shop or order in internet. You just put them on plants and let them eat those aphids! After ladybugs will grow and fly away))) you can also catch some and bring in your rooftop, but adult ladybugs eating much less than their larves. Also spray based on colsa oil is working pretty well against aphids.
 
And dont worry! Aphids is not that bad as spider mites! Those are really hard to get rid off... But against them there is phytoseiulus persimilis. Its also spider who eat spider mites and their eggs. After there is no spider mites to eat - they just die or go away to search where can they eat more. Ladybugs and phytoseiulus are the best outdoors growers friends))) heheheh))) :party::yummy:
 
Just an update

The plants on the roof are growing beautifully even if Fruit Spirit lost many fan leaves, they're just days away from harvest. But very big, juice and STICKY :) buds.

The last week(s) I was fighting (and learning about) a lot about nasty bugs. We had severe white-fly infestation, my Chillies seem to attract them like crazy. So I got me insecticidal soap and some Neem oil stuff and sprayed the plants (still spraying), those are really nasty. Seems the white-flies are sorta under control now.

Worse, the last week we found CATERPILLARS after I spotted some brown/rotten spots on some buds..I couldn't explain why some parts got brown. So by closer looking we saw Caterpillars which eat holes in the stem and buds.

Now I learned about them as well and that the only thing that works against them is a certain type of bacteria, there are products such as "Biothur which you can use to spray and kill them.

So I ordered the Biothur but they say it's best not to use close to harvest. So for the time being we need to check the plants manually and pick off those bastards.

Also...I found that the pots we use are RIDICULOUSLY undersized. Those pots are if anything 1.2gal and the plants are about 1m.
Not only are the pots way to small, it's also bad because they heat up when the sun hits them, not good for the roots.

So I also ordered 17L (4.5gal-5gal) WHITE POTS which should make a big difference for the next batch.
Because I spend quite some time spraying currently, say Insecticidal soap, I also bought a small manual pressure sprayer which should make things a lot easier, along with yellow sticky tape (for white-flies) and the Biothur for the caterpillars.

I have to say it's crazy how much we learned about growing, lighting, pests, ph, soil etc. in the last months.

Oh...one good thing: Just 100m from our house is a gardening store (which is rare because in this tiny town there is really NOTHING), and the garden store has "special soil" for MJ, 50L bag for €6.50. The soil seems VERY MUCH like "Canna Terra Pro" to me, very airy and fluffy with some Perlite in it. So this is really good since I can just go there and get soil in 2 mins and don't have to order online.

Ah...oh and from a classified site I bought 20 (+6 gratis) AUTO seeds from some guy incredibly cheap, like €0.75/seed, lol, but the seeds seem to suck. From 10, maybe 1 or two actually germinate. Pretty crappy. So I guess it's just better to buy from a reliable source where you know that you get seeds that actually germinate. (Cogoloandia is the one which is really cheap, they sell "bulk seeks" for like €1.50/pop and they work great). So I guess if we need more Autos I will buy from them again, not too expensive and quality seeds.

Update: So we DID harvest one plant today, this is from the Fruit Spirit :)

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